Angara space rocket installed on launch pad

MOSCOW, July 02. /ITAR-TASS/. A new date for the launch of the light-class rocket Angara-1.2PP, originally scheduled to blast off on June 27 only to remain on the ground after the automatic system stopped the countdown, has not been determined yet, the chief of the Russian space agency Roskosmos, Oleg Ostapenko, told ITAR-TASS. In the meantime, tests are in progress.

"We will do our best to find out the reasons of the rocket failure in a maximum short period of time. But one should not jump at conclusions. The checks should be maximum correct so as to prevent another mishap. Afterwards, we will consider a new date for the rocket launch," the Roscosmos chief said.

The rocket was scheduled to lift off from Plesetsk on June 27 but its launch was automatically cancelled and postponed for one day but never took place. The rocket was not supposed to carry any payload. Its second stage with a test weight was to land at the Kura range in Kamchatka, 5,700 kilometres from the cosmodrome.

Angara is one of the priorities in the development of the Plesetsk spaceport. In November 2013, a full-scale mock-up of the rocket was for the first time put up on the launch pad. It was a fully operational rocket but intended for ground testing only, not for launching.

Work to create the ground infrastructure for the new rocket and prepare an Angara launch is part of the federal program for the development of Russia’s cosmodromes in 2006-2015.